Javier
Téllez

Javier Téllez’s work is motivated by the need to make certain relegated populations, invisible because of their pathologies, interact with the history of art. The artist’s interest in psychology and psychiatry can be seen in each of his artistic projects.

Through different mediums, the Venezuelan artist explores the way in which mental illnesses and their patients are perceived in the collective imagination. Often working in collaboration with mental hospitals, he focuses his attention on madness as a source of social exclusion and a barrier to integration. He makes the irrational his research tool to question what we consider normal or abnormal.

The work of Javier Téllez kept in the Pinault Collection was presented for the first time during the exhibition “Speech of the Images”, held in 2012 at Palazzo Grassi in Venice.